The present invention relates to the field of cloud computing, and, more particularly, to routing service requests based on lowest actual cost within a federated virtual service cloud.
As the use of cloud services becomes commonplace in business practices, new approaches to providing cloud services have blossomed. One such new approach is the use of a virtual service cloud. Like typical cloud service providers, a virtual service cloud offers a cloud service or transaction. However, performance of the cloud service or transaction utilizes the resources of other cloud service providers; the virtual service cloud operates its cloud service within the cloud services of other cloud service providers.
For example, a virtual service cloud offering a credit card processing service instantiates its credit card processing service application within supporting cloud services that it has subscribed. That is, the virtual service cloud subscribes to other cloud services to support operation of its service application.
As such, the expenses incurred by the virtual service cloud depend upon the costs of using the supporting cloud services. Further, these operating costs for cloud services tend to fluctuate over time (i.e., different rates for different times of the day and day of the week).
The recent adoption of usage-based service cost models by cloud service providers that allow subscribed cloud services and/or blocks of cloud services to be switched on and off provides a fine-level of control for operating expenses. However, conventional virtual service clouds are unable to accommodate this level of expense control using current resource management and routing approaches.